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Precentral.net read through the initial TouchStone theory post I put up and asked HP about my theories. As they posted in this article on the site, HP confirmed the identification to work as I assumed.

The new TouchStones will use the 3.1 MHz frequency to pass a unique key to the new WebOS phones, which will enable them to know where it is docked. You will obviously have to tell the phone where each dock is located the first time you use it. Derek did a great job translating my geek speak into general WebOS fan digestible content.

Only a few errors with the wording in the document. He refers to a coil for each frequency. I believe that both frequencies will use the same coil. It is resonant on both the communication frequency (3.1 MHz) and the charging frequency (118.5 KHz), so there is no reason to add extra hardware to the mix. This isn't really important to the end user, but just trying to be technically correct.

Some have speculated that this 3.1 MHz frequency will allow the TouchStone to have a data USB cable. I don't think this is possible. The data rate on a 3.1 MHz carrier is very low. The best that could be emulated is an old style serial connection (think phone line modem speeds). Nothing even close to the speed of even USB 1.0. It will most likely only be a method of establishing the connection via Bluetooth for major data transfer. Otherwise, it will just be used to exchange fairly short messages, like the URL example shown during the Feb. 9th event.

When the Palm Pre was released, Palm also sold a unique inductive charger called the Touchstone. Inductive charging isn't new, by any means. Electric toothbrushes and many other devices have used them in the past. This was a first for cell phones, I believe.

When I purchased my Pre and eventually many Touchstones, I didn't have a good oscilloscope to play around with the signals. Now I do. With the announcement of HP's new phones and an expansion of the TouchStone coil functionality in the phone, I thought I would take a look.
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I've been a developer, on many different platforms, for just under two decades. Like many code monkeys, I enjoy learning new architectures. I'm not exactly sure why, but programming for WebOS has me more excited than I've been since working with GCC on the Palm Personal. The idea of building apps with web technologies on a portable device sounded interesting. I knew that certain things would be easy and others hard. That is always the case with any platform.

With Word Whirl queued up for release in the App Catalog, I decided it might help others to describe some of the things I've learned. This is my way of giving back to all the PreCentral users that helped during the process of taking Word Whirl from a request post to a published application. Hopefully this will help some more make the leap from Homebrew to App Catalog and get more apps out there.
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